Here is photographic scenery of selected places in the United States for flightgear. The scenery images have been created from the public domain imagery courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey USGS, have a resolution of about 3m/pixel (10ft/pixel) and are released under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL).

@RaptorI have now added a 'howto' section to the site at fgphotoscenery.square7.ch. The main difficulty is obtaining the free orthoimagery. This is hard to find, as the terms of service of the obvious places (google maps, yahoo maps, bing maps) do not allow the use of their imaging data outside of their applications (even for personal use) and much less their distribution. If this was possible, I would have adapted an existing code like GMaps to produce scenery tiles for flightgear. A collection of free orthoimagery can be found here.

@ Raptor(Did you edit your post? Didn't you want to get instructions on how to make photoscenery for a place in India?)The scenery can only be seen when using a patched version of flightgear. Please follow the installation instructions here. Beware: it is a quite tedious process.

statto, yes, you are absolutlely right. There are some spots where there is no USGS scenery available and thus some white spots remain in the scenery tiles. This is true for the middle of SF bay but also some regions around Florida's coast line. In principle it would be possible to use an image editing program like GIMP and try to fill these regions with texture copied from adjaccent regions. I have not ventured into that, yet, though. If someone has a go at it (ImageMagick's "convert" can be used to transform the .dds into .png) and sends me the edited file, I am happy to convert it back to .dds and put it into the scenery package for download.

I haven't tried it yet, but the pictures are very impressive. Are the patches such that FG has to run in either/or mode, or could this just be added to the default binary?

The main drawback from my perspective is that photo scenery doesn't seem to retain landclass information, so the weather system can no longer know if some spot is likely to generate convetive clouds or not - which spoils the cloud-terrain interaction in a major way.

The scenery can only be seen when using a patched version of flightgear. Please follow the installation instructions here. Beware: it is a quite tedious process.

If this depends on any custom patches, I would suggest to file a merge request - and just make this an optional startup/runtime mode, for example by using a custom property in FG_SRC/Main/options.cxx: http://gitorious.org/fg/flightgear/blob ... x#line1323So that the default behavior is not at all affected.

This would make it easier for other people using git to test your patches, because we could just "pull" your changes.

As far as I know, the patches could be added to the shaders without causing harm but that is a question that should probably be discussed with Benoit Laniel who made the patch in the first place and the flightgear shader gurus. flightgear looks "as usual" in the regions where there is no photoscenery available. It definitely would be absolutely great if no recompillation of flightgear would be required, as this is quite a hurdle.

As for the landclass information, comments from experts would be necessary, here. In principle it should be possible to have both, the landclass and the photo scenery. Indeed, playing around with options in the shader menu in fligthgear, it is possible to switch forward and back from the photoscenery to the normal look. Maybe the landclass information is still there?

Indeed, playing around with options in the shader menu in fligthgear, it is possible to switch forward and back from the photoscenery to the normal look. Maybe the landclass information is still there?

Then it appears to be still there. A working geodinfo() call would be the tell-tale. Then sorry for the confusion, I am only familiar with the early Brest photo scenery in which landclass was gone.